His first try at an open mic in front of an audience of savvy rappers shows he has a long way to go. When he offers them to his rapper hero Sher as the lyrics for angry songs, the performer wisely tells him to own his feelings and express them himself. To the film’s credit, these are not the occasional outpourings of a sensitive soul, but socially tinged verses that speak harsh truths. He sees his future in the exhausted, empty-eyed pen-pushers returning home on the subway at the end of the day.īut as is often repeated, Murad is an artist he takes all the humiliations and the injustices around him and uses them to make poetry. It is the disappointing reward for his hard-won undergraduate degree. (At one point, the large cars of the wealthy are favorably compared to the size of slum dwellings.) His mother is crushed by this development, and when attrition in the family reaches the breaking point, Murad is forced to go to work for his uncle in a lowly white collar job. Overcrowding in the slum is soon brought home when Murad’s sour father brings home a new bride, a fleshy young thing who displaces his mother in their one bedchamber, in a home the size of an SUV. But the film largely shies away from these expectations to probe more deeply into his evolving psychology and bid for greatness. The threat of running afoul of the law hangs over him for most of the film, despite the fact he’s scrupulously honest and law-abiding and is horrified by Moeen’s employment of little street kids for drug peddling. We meet him as a hanger-on of cocky Moeen (Vijay Varma), who involves him in stealing a car. It is the swampy reality Murad struggles to break out of to follow his dream. Akhtar and her co-screenwriter Reema Kagti make good use of this metaphorical location to suggest stagnancy and claustrophobia. The story is set in Dharavi, the same huge Mumbai wasteland seen in Slumdog Millionaire and Salaam Bombay! With a population of 700,000 souls living cheek by jowl, it’s a colorful if sobering reminder that the economic miracle has not eradicated abject poverty in India. Lending strong backup are Alia Bhatt ( Raazi) as his volatile love interest Safeena and Siddhant Chaturvedi in the role of his rap guru and pal Sher. With his hair combed over his eyes and noticeably muscle-bound, he is heroic but mild-mannered, rarely exceeding the sphere of believability. Her main asset is Ranveer Singh, who broke into Bollywood with the rom-com Band Baajat Baaraat and who here shows a pleasingly full emotional range that extends to drama and hip-hop. Zoya Akhtar ( Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara) directs with flair and passion and, aided by explosive performances from a right-on cast, triumphs over the familiarity of the star-is-born storyline. But he has been given a great talent to write and perform in the hip-hop idiom of his time, and as his faith in himself grows, it sees him through to a rousing climax after a long, two-and-a-half-hour journey.
The seething anger of India’s urban dispossessed finds its voice in the white-hot rap of Gully Boy, the story of a poor young man whose future looks as dim as everyone around him.